March 24th, 2007

What's new -

Max hinted at it, some of you guessed it - PVP! Ok, so it's pretty rudimentary right now, and extremely unstructured. But existence is the better part of valor - we've been having a good time up here blowing each other to bits in PVP. To get to the PVP arena, buy a map to it from Jayna - it's only 1GP - you can afford it! When you enter, you'll automatically be dumped into a team, Red or Blue. Points for the teams are very crudely tracked. But it's fun to beat each other up just the same, and your skill usage pattern is bound to change - skills you don't use much in PVE are REALLY useful here. ( Lava, anyone? ) Sprint is also a lifesaver, and all the Pyromancers will be jealous. So, there are bound to be numerous issues, and there are obviously HUGE gaps as far as structure. You can't 'win', and there are no real rewards. The arena is not broken into areas by level range, so it's a real free-for-all as far as player levels. There's no good onscreen messaging other than some crude output in the chat, and no neat sounds, or messages to really push everything along - but of course, all that will be coming. We just want you in and bashing each other's heads in while we do it, because you're bound to find things that should be done for PVP that we haven't thought of yet - and we want your input!

So, to prevent a lot of posts about obvious things - Win states + awards - they'll be getting added Arena tiering by level - HAS to happen Score messaging - we WILL be adding onscreen score tracking You can't tell what team a pet is on - but you soon WILL be able to You can use potions - you probably shouldn't be able to New gameplay modes, and Versus PVP - you betcha A penalty or timer for leaving the arena, so you can't skip immediately out Queues for Team arena battles, so you all start out on an even footing - also probably needs to happen in some shape or form

Other stuff -

New Skills! - Bloodletters dropped all rifle skills and got several new ones - Pyromancers got a couple of new ones too! Skills also saw a good bit of balancing work.

Link bar! The bottom bar is no longer a belt - it is more of a WoW style link-bar. You can drop skills in it and insta-cast them with the number keys! The F1-F12 key functionality is still preserved for right-binds, so hopefully you get the best of both worlds. You can link potions down there too. Right now potion links are to the individual stacks, but we may be changing this to links to all potions of a type. Super helpful in PVP

'Gambling' - Lewyn the Bargain Hunter is set up Diablo2 Gambling-style - lots of items with known stats and requirements and slightly randomized prices - you can get a good deal, or a crummy one, but it's the start of a money-sink. Ideally, we'd like a BETTER money-sink, but this is a start.

Buyback - each merchant has an entire Buyback pane! It'll probably get pruned to just a few slots, but here you go, because we love you!

Trading interface fix - items shouldn't overlap in there anymore

New Armor - 2 new armor sets, comprising about 16 new pieces of armor. Armor was also rebalanced some

Quest Fixes! - The Han Bashton quest should (hopefully) be fixed. The Kayne quest should also work properly now, if all goes well. And you should be able to find that War-Torn Rockjaw leg now.

Leveling slowed down a little bit - the XP gain was flattened some

Epic & Party dungeons harder, with not quite as much of an XP bonus

Switching to Widescreen should preserve proper zoom levels

Character select screen shouldn't show the 'create' pane if it is selecting a previously created character on entry

Rifles nerfed - man, they were powerful!

Firing spells ( Flaming Dart, Meteor ) at close monsters should no longer miss them and fire on the other side

Weapon Set switching - you now have 2 weapon equipment sets, and can swap between them with W at any time, or by clicking the tabs under the hand slots in your inventory. Again, because we love you! Also super-helpful in PVP.

Performance improvements - we continue to streamline and optimize, and hopefully some of you notice a nice little framerate increase.

Probably some other things I am forgetting

Various fixes all over the place - hopefully for more bugs than we introduced

Again, thanks to all of you for your continued contributions - we all appreciate it a ton!